News: Tagged as FF Dagny

New Year, new typeface! Our friends over at the Norwegian communications agency, fasett have completely revamped and relaunched their visual identity using one of our very own FontFonts, FF Dagny.

We particularly love the About Us page ... Follow their gaze as you pass your mouse over each person.

The award-winning FF Dagny family has five weights, each with a companion italic. Designed by Örjan Nordling andGöran Söderström in 2009, it was awarded an ISTD International Typographic Award in 2011.

We’d love to feature your work

Have you used a FontFont in one of your projects recently? If so, we’d love to feature you! Just drop Lucy a line (lucy@fontfont.de) and she’ll be in touch.

You may have heard that our Web FontFonts are now supported by 98% of all desktop browsers. With a tantalising typographical treasure trove of 2240 Web FontFonts, it’s sometimes tricky to decide which web font is the best fit for your online brand presence. To provide a little inspiration and help you choose, we’ve brought together a selection of in-use cases of our top ten most popular web fonts that have caught our eye recently.

The marvellous FF Meta andFF Meta Serif, Erik Spiekermann’s No-Brainer, feature on this great site Parse by How. Parse is a real smörgåsbord of design content; they scour the web to bring together what they call design ‘tapas for the brain’.

One of our bestsellers and a real classic typeface, FF DIN, features on the Budget 4 Change website. The thin horizontal strokes and fluent curves of FF DIN provide a sober and solid tone to the site which is dedicated to mapping, tracking and analyzing donor government budgets against official development assistance.

Evolution, Revolution, Solution. That is the simple philosophy behind Typolution, the ‘purely’ typographical website that covers the latest developments, innovations and advancements in the industry (all in German). The site uses our very own FF Unit for the body text and FF Unit Slab for the headers, offering a cool yet disciplined tone.

The website for the VRB (Vorratsgesellschaft) organization based in Germany is set in one of the bestselling and most serious text faces, the formidable FF Scala and FF Scala Sans. The VRB offers ‘off the’ Shelf Companies and legal advice.

Two Arms Inc are a team of two, who combine illustration and design in a delightful manner. Based in Brooklyn they are famed for their passion for screenprinting. Their website employs FF Dagny, by Örjan Nordling and Göran Söderström. Great minds think alike, as we use it on our site too!

We’ve recently received some lovely examples of FontFonts in-use. Keep ’em coming! If you’ve used a FF in a recent project and you’d like to be featured on our site, please email lucy@fontfont.de.

Every now and then we are asked for typefaces containing alternative characters – the first letter of the alphabet is especially interesting in this respect as the Latin script knows two forms of the lower case a: the double-storey a is one of the most distinctive letters in a typeface while the single-storey a is rather neutral and decent. So you can considerably change the character of a typeface by simply swapping just one letter.

Thanks to OpenType both forms can be contained in one font and the user can easily switch between the two forms (in applications that support OT layout features, like Adobe’s Creative Suite for instance). Many of the innovative FontFonts offer this opportunity:

Typographic diversity – A new era for web design

BERLIN, GERMANY, February 2010

A more diverse and beautiful web is about to unfold. The latest release of the FontFont® typeface library marks the beginning of a new era for typography – FSI FontShop® International is introducing the first ever stand-alone FontFonts for the web. Finally web designers can use professional typefaces for their projects without relying on system fonts or webfont services. This long-awaited step enables a more seamless and effective transition from print design to the web. More than 30 of the most successful FontFont families are available now as Web FontFonts, including FF DIN®, FF Meta®, FF Dax®, and FF Kievit®. More will follow soon.

BERLIN, GERMANY, November 2009 – FSI FontShop International announced the latest additions to its award-winning FontFont® typeface library.

The new FontFonts

FF Mach™ The very first sketches of FF Mach were drawn in 2004 when a colleague who planned a new Polish magazine about culture and arts asked Łukasz Dziedzic for a logo – there was neither time nor money, so he did it quickly and for free. The logo was met with approval and Łukasz was asked for some sample covers and a few days later for the whole layout – again immediately and free of charge. Łukasz agreed with mixed feelings, thinking this might be a chance to use some of his fonts and even make a new one based on the logo and title graphics. The new font worked well but unfortunately, after the magazine failed three months later, it was never used again until Łukasz decided in 2008 to redraw all the glyphs in order to remove the traces of that speedy work, and in the end he designed a complete new type family with six weights and three widths.

FF Masala™ is as unctuous as a curry sauce with a hint of chili to add zest. Xavier Dupré’s initial idea for FF Masala was to offer a casual Sans matching FF Tartine Script. After rethinking and refining, FF Masala became a truly casual type system with three Sans weights and their Italics plus three powerful Script versions with swashes, right for logos and packaging as well as comics or children’s book covers.

BERLIN, GERMANY, July 2009 - FSI FontShop International announced the latest additions to its award-winning FontFont® typeface library.

The new FontFonts

FF Dagny™ — In 2002, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) changed from broadsheet to tabloid – a change that came along with a major impact on DN’s journalism, editing and design. Pangea design’s Creative Director, Örjan Nordling, had already worked with DN as a design consultant in 1996. In 2000, DN had been redesigned under the leadership of Dr. Mario Garcia. For the new design Nordling had created DN Bodoni exclusively for Dagens Nyheter. The change to tabloid called for a more compact setting and Pangea design was commissioned to produce a matching sans serif for Sweden’s largest daily newspaper. This became DN Grotesk which now has evolved into FF Dagny.

For the FontFont library Nordling and Göran Söderström made several adjustments, the contrast in stroke thickness was reduced for better legibility in small sizes and characters were redesigned together with the FontFont Type Department. The family now includes a range of consistent weights from Thin to Black making it perfect for use in body text and all kind of other applications. The name Dagny is an abbreviation of Dagens Nyheter as well as an old nordic female name meaning “new day”.

FF Duper™ — Martin Wenzel’s original idea from 1998 evolved into a kind of informal FF Profile in the end. The new FF Duper has a home-made touch, but provides of course all typographic qualities of a contemporary OpenType font. FF Duper consists of Regular, Bold, Regular Italic and Bold Italic weights, supports more than 60 languages, has several figure sets and fractions and includes alternative forms for a, g and y as well as a set of arrows, bullets and ornaments. And there is a special extra: All weights contain three versions of each glyph and via an OpenType feature the three alternatives are used in succession, treating vowels and consonents separately and recognizing even spaces between words for a lively and hand-made appearance of the typed text. Preliminary versions of the typeface have already been successful in education and school projects, but there are surely more areas where FF Duper perfectly fits in.

FF Kava™ started out as a free typeface called Kaffeesatz, published by Yanone in 2004 during the early stages of his type designing career. The bold weight was reminiscent of coffeehouse grotesk typefaces of the 1920s, while the lighter versions were supposed to bridge the gap to contemporary type design.

The current FF Kava family is a carefully revised, more rounded version of the old Kaffeesatz fonts. A black weight has been added as well as small caps and more figure sets to form now an attractive modern and soft sans serif type family.

FF Unit® Slab: When Kris Sowersby, Christian Schwartz and Erik Spiekermann were designing the parameters for FF Meta Serif, they spent quite some time on details like the thickness and the shape of the serifs – should the face veer towards a slab with blocky, heavy serifs or should it be more of a traditional book face? In the end, they went for a “normal” serif face with fairly solid serifs, but some thick-thin contrast and counters that aren’t totally parallel to the outside shape of the letters. Stronger and thus more useful than Times New Roman while not as constructed as Rockwell.